eipcp

The other side of 'we're all in it together'

Rodrigo Nunes

Back in 2005, I was one of the few Brazilians, apart from the family,
that attended a demonstration and mass in memory of Jean Charles de
Menezes. That was still in the days when it was legal to gather outside
the Houses of Parliament, and after a short vigil there, people walked
to the Westminster Cathedral in Victoria, were the mass was held. As the
smallish crowd moved, a well-dressed lady walking in the opposite
direction shouted at us: ‘What are you on about? Police kill boys like
him everyday in Brazil!’. The situation stunned me, not least because of
how unlikely a heckler she looked; it showed what a tense place London
had become, shortly in the wake of the 7/7 bombings. To some extent, I
could understand how she felt – one of the most insidious aspects of the
politics of fear
is that, even when you are rationally aware of how fear is guiding your
reactions, you still cannot rationalise it away. But, obviously, what
she said was especially hurtful, both because it sounded very much like a
statement about the low relative value of a Brazilian life (compared to
the sensed threat against British ones), and because it was, strictly
speaking, true: anybody in the UK who is minimally informed about Brazil
will have heard about its huge social inequality, and how that
translates in hugely unequal, brutal policing.

It is obvious why I recalled that incident as soon as I heard about
the Tottenham riots last weekend, given what the spark was that lit this
particular fuse: the police killing a man, roughly the same age as
Menezes, under circumstances that – especially after recent cases like
Ian Tomlinson’s or Smiley Culture’s – cannot but sound suspicious. Add
to that an all-time low in confidence in public institutions,
particularly after the phone hacking scandal that exposed the way in
which a tiny clique set decades of political agenda; an area that has
known its fair share of police abuse in the past and present;
deteriorating standards of living and future prospects that are ever
darker; and a widespread feeling of having been sold short, when the
impacts of the crisis seem so disproportionately distributed, and ‘being
in it together’ seems to mean very different things for the rich and
the poor. With all the wisdom afforded by things that have already
happened, it would be tempting to say now that an outbreak like this
would not be long in coming.

In 1625, Francis Bacon published an analysis of uprisings
(“seditions”), in which he distinguished between their material causes –
the inflammable material – and occasional ones – the contingent events
that act as sparks. Material causes are of two kinds: a certain level of
deprivation that becomes unbearable, and discontent, which may exist
without the first. The occasional ones could be any of a number of
potential flames that, falling on the existing combustible matter, cause
individuals to ‘unite in injury’. If a government wants to prevent
seditions, he concludes, there is no point in focusing on occasional
causes, which are relatively unpredictable. It is those feelings of
deprivation, disenfranchisement and discontent that must be addressed;
for it is only when the latter are present that something can act as a
catalyst for what until then were relatively dissociated elements, and
push those suffering them beyond a threshold where they decide to act –
to collectively manifest that “enough is enough”.

Still, neither just the existence of grievances nor the presence of a
“final straw” suffice to make an individual or a crowd take action. In
the moment when someone takes their chances crossing a border to look
for a better life, when a person throws a brick through a window, or a
crowd decides to face down a police line, there is always something that
cannot be reduced to whatever causes, material or occasional, were
there before. While the latter can build up over a long time, this
‘something’ is no more than an instant, the tiniest of supplements, but
without which nothing would happen. For centuries, people have remarked
that the surprising thing was not that revolts happened, but that they
did not happen more often; surely the reasons why the Ancien Régime
in France, Ben Ali in Tunisia or Mubark in Egypt were toppled did not
come about overnight, so why did people put up for so long – and why did
it then happen when it did? It is this little subjective excess over
objective causes that is always impossible to pin down.

As the image of what took place over these days becomes clearer, it
may be possible to use this subjective excess as a criterion to draw
distinctions between what happened here and there. It is one thing to be
motivated by the urge to express, by any means necessary (and often the only ones that will get you heard),
years of pent-up rage, frustration, humiliation. It is another to
suddenly lose your fear because you have realised that, in a large
enough number, you will be able to get one back on the cops
for once. It is yet another to calculate that police forces stretched
thin and a broken shop window offer a good opportunity to acquire some
gear free of charge. Regardless of how exactly these lines can or will
be drawn, however, three lessons seem clear.

The first is that it is simply absurd to say that the riots have
nothing to do with politics. Sure enough, many of those who engaged in
them may not have had politics on their minds as they did; and it is
especially saddening to see all the local people who had their lives
threatened and their livelihoods destroyed, when they belong to the same communities and suffer from the same social ills as the rioters.
But subjective motivation cannot be mistaken for material and
occasional causes, which are, as Bacon knew, evidently political in
nature. It is not simply a statistical anomaly that no-one has ever seen
bankers loot a shop; neither is it down to their superior education, or
refined taste. It is obvious that the fact that it is always the
poorest who do it says something about the distribution of wealth and
opportunities in a society – and in the present, post-bailout, post-NoW
climate, probably also demonstrates that more and more people suspect
that bankers effectively have access to much more efficient,
state-sanctioned ways of looting. That this is the case means that to
ascribe the material and occasional causes of what has happened to the
coalition’s austerity plan alone is to tell only half the story – we
have to look back at decades of disenfranchisement, including the
feeling that it makes no difference what party is in power, it will
always be only a tiny fraction of society that has its interests
politically represented.

The second lesson is: these riots are the other side of ‘we’re all in
it together’. Not just because, as places like Greece and Spain have
recently demonstrated, there is only so much that people can give, and
that they can be expected to take, before they decide that enough is
enough. But also because a society that sees inequality grow and does
nothing about it is one where events like these are bound to happen.

There is a perverse ‘social contract’ that can be found in places
like Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, or Mexico City – where a small elite
swap their disproportionate access to wealth, opportunities and
political representation for living within gated communities, spending
fortunes in security, being afraid. Its best illustration may well come
from those parts of favelas in the South Side of Rio that have
become militarised no-go zones for the Brazilian state; overlooking, in
close proximity, the richest areas in town, they seem to say: ‘we may
have no welfare, we may have no political voice, but we’re still here.
Look over your shoulder – we’rein it together’.

Of course, social problems in Europe are far from that level. But the
point here is that accepting inequality is a Faustian pact: ultimately,
one buys into a spiraling trade-off between consumption and privilege –
even if that is the dubious privilege of security services – and rights
– the right to move freely without fear, the right to good public
services etc. You can have a shiny new car, but if one day it is stolen,
or breaks down because the city has flooded, public transport will be
either too bad or too dangerous for you to use. You can have
ridiculously expensive shoes, but someone, some day, may decide to take
them from you at gunpoint. Looting and theft are, in fact, just another
side of this trade-off; what compensates it, like a sort of ‘unofficial’
(if inefficient) wealth redistribution mechanism. Roll back shared
infrastructure and services and replace them with consumption, and those
who cannot consume but are constantly enjoined to do so will acquire
goods by ‘other means’.

Do not address these issues, and they take root: see, for example,
the territorial control exercised by drug cartels in parts of Mexico, or
how São Paulo’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Commando of the Capital) has managed to shut down the city twice
(not unlike what happened in London in the last few days). And no
amount of heavy-handed policing can stop this dynamic. Places where
social disparity is the highest tend to be those where the police is
most clearly a brutal instrument to protect the rich from the poor, and still
are among the most violent. Being hell for the poor does not make it
paradise for the rich. Or maybe the super rich – like those who, in
places like these, move about in their helicopters – will not notice the
difference. Everyone else, however, will somehow chip in to pay the
price of this pact.

Ultimately, then, the UK rioters need not have been ‘thinking
politics’ to send a political message; for the final lesson to be drawn
is no different from that coming from the ‘explicitly’ political
protests in Greece, Spain or Israel: the gap between rich and poor is
getting bigger and bigger, and the vast majority feel more and more
cheated. If things are not to get uglier, the time to change course is
now.

When Spain won the World Cup, Barcelona, an Argentinean
publication sarcastically named after the favoured destination of that
country’s migrants, celebrated it with a tongue-in-cheek cover: ‘Crisis,
unemployment, poverty, the end of welfare, submission to the IMF and
sporting success: the poor countries of the world salute the Spanish – Welcome to the Third World!’.
Apart from being a brilliant joke, the headline made an excellent
point: why is it that what is crystal clear for people in the global
North when talking about the global South seems so difficult to process
when it happens ‘at home’? Ask any relatively well-informed British
citizen about violence in Brazil, and they are likely to tell you
something about unequal wealth distribution, lack of opportunities, or
even how the drug traffic goes to places where the state has never been,
how many young men see carrying a gun as the only way to earn a sense
of worth and respect, how the police make matters worse by being widely
perceived as corrupt and prejudiced, and how the political system mostly
reproduces this situation. And yet, right now, I can imagine that lady I
saw in Victoria. ‘Why should I listen to you?’, she is saying. ‘Your
country has much greater social problems than mine.’